Arista

Arista sat with the other wide-eyed hatchlings, listening raptly as the ancient ridgeback wove a tale of love and hate, betrayal and destruction, death and rebirth. She gasped with the others when the hero succumbed to the dark, and grinned when he rose once more to combat his demons. She giggled when he made a fool of himself in front of the beautiful fae princess, and cried when he had to choose between loving her and saving his home.
When the legend wove to an end, she sat in respectful, awed silence, big dark eyes glowing with thought in the flickering firelight. Then her best friend, who was vain and vivacious, who called herself Princess because there had been no one to name her anything else, broke the pregnant silence.
"Is there a legend about dragons like us, Vigilia?"
The huge brown dragon wrapped the tail wrapped in bloody bandages and lined with cruel spikes around her paws and seemed not to need an elaboration. She knew what Princess meant, just as everyone did. Everyone was acutely aware that Arista and her 'siblings' were different, weren't even siblings at all. They were unnatural. They were unworldly. They were abandoned.
"You're special," said the ridgeback, and Arista looked up, eyes intent on her face as she waited for more of the oncoming story. The mirrors, guardians, tundras, faes, and single bogsneak crowded a little closer to both the ridgeback and to each other, because they also knew a story was coming. This one, though, would not be fictional, and they all knew it.
"Dragons such as yourselves have been around since the first age," said Vigilia, her armored head turned on the dancing orange flames as though she was contemplating swallowing them whole. "You were around when the gods clashed, hidden in your eggs, waiting to be discovered. You will never know parents, perhaps you will never even know parenthood. Dragons such as yourselves have a greater purpose. They are said to be leaders. They are said to be the ones destined to lead legions of dragons. They are the most common leaders of the lairs scattered across Sornieth."
Arista listened raptly, drinking in every word.
"You are strange, you are unnatural, you are special. You have a greater purpose."
When silence stretched, hardly a rustle to be heard among the crowd of forty hatchlings, Princess spoke again.
"Will I lead this lair?" she asked boldly, and though it was hard to see in the ever-changing lights, Arista thought Vigilia might have smirked underneath her helm.
"No," she answered. "You have no place here." Arista, now fully-grown, shouldered her pack and gazed across the wide sprawl of pale green land before her, songs filling the territory to the brim with the whims of the wind. Princess stood at her side, her fuchsia scales and mighty purple wings a stark contrast to Arista's paler appearance.
"This is it, then," Princess spoke first, as she always did. Arista nodded, turning to her, sorrow filling her until it seemed to split her at her seams, but not regret. Ever since she'd flopped out of her egg, she felt a tug in her chest, a yearning to find what was missing and make it her own.
It was time for her to start The Search.
"I'll miss you, dearly," said Arista softly, and Princess butted heads with her. Perhaps it was to disguise her emotion, but Arista saw the single tear fall to the grass anyway.
"I'll miss you so, so much," she said, raising her head at last, and Arista felt a wrench of grief at the wetness glistening in her best friend's eyes. "You're sure I can't convince you to stay any longer?"
Arista didn't want to say what she knew she had to. "You know that's not possible, Princess. I intend to go to my birthplace, and you... Well, you want to go to the Sea of a Thousand Currents."
Princess dipped her head in acknowledgement. "Yes. I'll miss you," she said again, and Arista pressed her forehead against hers.
"Don't forget to meet me at the Sea of a Thousand currents in six months," said Princess, her green eyes fierce. "Don't you dare forget, Arista. I want to hear all about your adventures. I want to hear everything."
"I won't forget," she promised. "I'd never forget, Princess. This isn't goodbye, not really."
Princess looked away, fighting against tears, but her voice was strangled with them when she spoke again, "It feels that way."
"It isn't," Arista insisted. "It isn't."
And then, because she knew she wouldn't leave if she lingered any longer, she stepped forward and laced her neck around Princess's in a brief, tight hug, before stepping away. "I'll see you again. I promise."
It was only after she saw Princess nod that she turned and started down the hill. She didn't look back. Part of her didn't dare to, and the other part of her didn't want to. She didn't want to do anything but move forward now. This was the start of her story.
Excitement quaked in her gut. Her Search had begun. Arista strolled along the sloping, grassy steppes lined with bushes under which Wind dragons curled around their hatchlings, and sometimes, she couldn't help herself from stopping and staring. She didn't quite understand the dynamic a family had, but she understood the overflowing love as she watched a mother nuzzle her son's cheek, or when a father taught his young daughter how to fly with all the gentle patience anyone could ask for. She understood that those little hatchlings had adults who loved them, who would make sure that they acquired the skills they would need to thrive when they were old enough to set out on their own, who would love their children's offspring and their offspring and their offspring.
And as Arista watched a spiral scurry to clean her pearlcatcher son, she wondered how that could be. How could a dragon love another just because they were related to someone that they were related to? Because really, that's all grandparents were. Just...a relative of a relative.
How did that earn such unconditional love?
She supposed it didn't really matter. She would never have that.
Arista turned away and kept going, passing the families with the little hatchlings who watched her with curious eyes from underneath their parents' protective embraces.
She told herself it didn't matter. There were enough dragons like her- dragons who were among the first generation- who had made it just fine. They had found their families, even if it was a little split.
Because, Arista realized with a slight jolt, if she had any hatchlings, they would have no grandparents. At least, no maternal ones. And probably no paternal ones either, because every time she imagined having a mate (which was not often), she couldn't picture herself falling for someone who couldn't understand the hole in her heart that a lack of a family left.
She shook it off, smiling slightly at her silliness. After all, she wasn't ready to be a mother by any means. She had a Search to complete, and she was only a young adult herself. She wasn't even sure her body was ready to mate, even if there was someone with whom she wanted to- to-
A flush rose in her cheeks and she told herself to focus, for goodness sake.
However, she found it hard to ignore the families settling in for the night as evening fell, so Arista occupied herself with thoughts of keeping an eye out for BeastClans. The Windswept Plateau was by far the safest Clan, but one couldn't be too careful, and she needed the distraction anyway.
Arista kept walking on, even after it was past dark, until she could see the Scarred Wasteland on the horizon, and it was only then that she stopped. She wanted to see the place that the color of her eyes told her where her egg had come from, but she had no wish to spend the night there. She had done her research. One had to be cunning and careful and clever and tough to survive in the Scarred Wasteland, and she didn't want to sleep there until she knew what she was up against.
So she dropped her pack off under a bush, sank into the soft grass with a sigh, and closed her dark eyes. When she dreamed, it was of being a hatchling again and frolicking with Princess and the other first-generation hatchlings she had grown up with.

When Arista awoke, the sun was just beginning to prod pink fingers of dawn into the still-gray sky. She yawned widely, stretched her lithe, muscular body, and ate some leafy plants from her pack, as they would rot first and she didn't know if she would be able to tell what was edible in a Clan she had never seen before. Briefly, she wondered who had found her egg, and why a Wind dragon had been scavenging in the Scarred Wasteland. Then she decided that it wasn't important.
Arista swallowed the last of her food, licked her lips, and folded her worn, obnoxiously-pink pack (courtesy of Princess, who had found it while digging around and decided to dye it before presenting it to her) closed and secured it to her muscular shoulders once more.
She set off, her steps become more wary when she reached the molten land where the grassy plains of the Windswept Plateau met the bubbling, rancid land of the Scarred Wasteland. It was almost undefined, a place where the strange appendages reaching for the green steppes had slowed its growth somehow, but had not been transformed to the fine greenery of the home Arista had come to know.
Warily, she stepped onto one such grayish outcropping, which spanned the chasm over lapping water like the roots of some great plant. She crossed carefully, only pressing her weight down where she was positive the 'bridge' (for want of a better word) would be able to handle it. Eventually, she tired of this, and she spread her flaxen wings and flew across, though she wished she hadn't had to risk drawing unnecessary attention of unfriendly Plague dragons or BeastClans.
She landed on the other side, her paws sinking against the spongy, mushy, reddish earth, and a thrill ran through her. She had reached the Scarred Wasteland with no trouble. The first leg of her journey was over.
However, as she raised her eyes and studied her birthplace with fresh eyes, she wondered if she had made the right choice. From the safety of the Wind lair, going to the place where her egg had been dug up had seemed like the correct course of action, but now that she was here...
The land rolled red under her paws, and it sank here and there, but not in the way of water-saturated earth. It was as though she was walking on injured ground, on sores that groaned under her steps. This land was diseased. After Arista padded carefully across the red earth for a few miles, she realized that it wasn't entirely unpleasant- just different from what she was used to, and that was fine with her.
As the young guardian padded through her birth Clan, she noted the differences between this strange, pulsating place and the Clan she had grown up in. They were...irreconcilably different, and it made her wonder what the other Clans were like.
Arista spent the next few hours trying to scavenge for food.
She had...mixed success.
She couldn't tell the difference between food and something fraught with disease, so once the food in her beloved pack began to run low, she decided there was nothing for it. She would have to grate her pride and seek out other dragons. She couldn't help but feel a little disappointed in herself- after all, she'd thought she was a little more capable than that.